Fig. 9.—Ceratophyllus gallinulae. Male (above) and female (below). Drawn to scale and both highly magnified. These specimens, taken from a grouse, are of the same genus as one of the plague-conveying fleas.
From long experience, I am very nearly insect proof; but cannot stand the myriads of fleas I occasionally have to sleep with in a hut of the above description—especially just before the rains set in, when additional veld pests come into the huts for shelter.
We must, in the long run, treat fleas seriously. Although the Pulex irritans is a very common insect, the greatest living authority on fleas tells me it has never been accurately drawn. We have Blake’s ‘ghost of a flea’; but what did Blake know of entomology? In distinguishing one flea from another—fleas which may attack man and fleas which have hitherto declined to do so—every hair, every bristle, counts. Hence, I illustrate this article with accurate outlines of certain fleas found on the grouse, and for whose accuracy I can vouch ([Fig. 9]).
As I have said above, a certain rat-flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) and another (Ceratophyllus fasciatus) undoubtedly convey the bacillus of plague from rats and other Murinae to man and vice versa. The Bacillus pestis is unlikely to establish itself in the present war in Europe, but Quién sabe? The Black Death of 1349–51 was conveyed by fleas, and so was Pepys’s Plague of 1665. Plague—flea-borne, we must remember—is still endemic in places as near Europe as Tripoli, and in numerous centres in Asia. Not a disease altogether to be neglected, since the spread of war to the Near East, but still not very threatening in Europe in the twentieth century.
CHAPTER IV
THE FLOUR-MOTH (Ephestia kühniella) IN SOLDIERS’ BISCUITS
Where moth ... doth corrupt. (Matt. vi. 19.)
It is not only those insects that destroy the continuity of our soldiers’ integument which play a part in war. It has been well said that an army marches on its stomach; and the admirable commissariat arrangements which have been so distinctive a feature of the British Expeditionary Force during the present war are the result of much patient care and attention during times of peace. I am in no position to discriminate, but I do believe that the admirable service of the A.S.C. and the R.A.M.C. is at least equal to the splendid record of those in the fighting-line.
Every one knows that recruits are frequently rejected for some defect in their teeth. A soldier, indeed, requires strong teeth, for his farinaceous food in the field is largely supplied to him in the form of biscuits—not that ‘moist and jovial sort of viand,’ as Charles Dickens described the Captain biscuit, but ‘hard-tack’ which challenges the stoutest molars.
During the summer of 1913 the authorities of the British Museum at South Kensington arranged a very interesting but somewhat gruesome exhibit in their Central Hall. The exhibit consisted mainly of Army biscuits eaten through and through by the larva of a small moth and covered by horrible webs or unwholesome-looking skeins of silky threads.